Techaisle Blog

Techaisle data shows that the percent of US SMBs using web-video conferencing solutions is likely to increase from 38% to 89%, a change of 184%. It is common knowledge that cloud is being adopted by SMBs and midmarket businesses for business agility and video-conferencing is playing an increasing role in contributing to SMB agility - decision agility, productivity agility, customer agility and innovation agility - for high-growth and innovative businesses. Businesses without modern collaboration solutions are scrambling to catch up with those that are already capitalizing on the benefits video-conferencing solutions. As new adopters are learning from firms that have already made early investments in the technology, Techaisle is seeing reasons for launching collaboration initiatives rapidly evolve. A comparison of early adopters to firms that are just now embracing advanced collaboration systems finds that the pace set by early adopters is forcing other SMB firms to invest in collaboration solutions to address current and future market issues.

This next generation of SMBs & midmarket business collaboration solution adopters is responding to specific pain points, more than their predecessors and video-conferencing is figuring in their collaboration strategies, specifically because:

• They cannot coordinate meetings involving employees in multiple locations
• Customer satisfaction is declining
• The pace of decision making is too slow
• Email is not an adequate means of connecting staff with each other and with customers
• They are trailing competitors and want to catch up
• They have to keep pace with market uncertainty and want to find new avenues for business viability and growth

Survey data finds that these firms have begun using video-collaboration solutions as a reaction to business problems that are preventing them from achieving their business objectives of growth, productivity, time to market, customer retention and operating cost reduction.

It is common knowledge that cloud is being adopted by SMBs and midmarket businesses for business agility. Techaisle’s SMB & midmarket cloud adoption study data shows that 80 percent of SMBs consider cloud to be contributing to business growth and video-enabled collaboration is playing an ever-increasing role in contributing to business agility for high-growth and innovative businesses. But why?

Because Innovation happens best in collaboration and not in isolation.

High-growth, highly innovative SMBs and midmarket businesses differ greatly from low-growth firms in their use of advanced collaboration technologies. High-growth firms pursue a wide range of collaboration-related benefits – more rapid decision-making capacity, improved employee productivity, richer engagement with customers, and better internal collaboration – and make extensive use of face-to-face (F2F) video systems.

Techaisle survey data shows that initial centricity of file sharing is giving way to rich in-person interactive communications in collaboration strategies.

What are the key elements of a collaboration framework that can help IT decision makers (ITDMs) and business decision makers (BDMs) come to a mutual understanding of how, where and why to use video-enabled collaboration solutions, in particular, F2F video? To answer this question, Techaisle conducted a survey of 1,269 ITDMs and BDMs with SMBs and midmarket businesses, across the US, Latin America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.

Techaisle’s research identified key characteristics that distinguish these low-growth, moderate growth and high-growth/innovative businesses. As figure below demonstrates, use of face-to-face video (F2F video) is correlated with important outcomes within their businesses. Collectively, these attributes align strongly with market success. Techaisle’s research found that the high adopters of video grew nearly 2X faster than other low or non-adopters and they reported even more benefits from using video than slower growing businesses. By using video-enabled collaboration there are only upsides for businesses.